Anyone who thinks that modern data centers don't evaporate their "recirculated FRESH water" straight into the ocean can safely have their opinions summarily discarded.

Data centers consume...a lot...of water by design, recirculated water, does not means no water consumption. Water must be continuously added in evaporative cooling systems used by many data centers.

[1] - Cooling towers reject heat through evaporation, which uses water, not just recirculates it. Evaporated water is lost to the atmosphere and must be replaced with "make-up" water. As a result, recirculating cooling loops still require new water input to make up evaporation and blowdown losses.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower

..so outlaw cooling towers and use dry coolers.. what?

Please google "datacenter evaporative cooling" and then re-evaluate

Whoa: is this the only possible form of cooling?

What if there were a cooler that somehow didn't evaporate water, you might even call it a "dry cooler" - that would be a sweet invention. This might even be required in areas where adiabatic cooling isn't effective (humid climates)!

Even if the ambient relative humidity is near 100%, water's latent heat of vaporization is nothing to shake a stick at.

I like the idea of a giant heat pump into the ground, but heat exchangers are expensive and so is digging.

Nobody is talking about a giant ground-exchange heat pump: liquid-to-air dry coolers exist and are used everywhere. Adiabatic cooling is just cheaper.